“... No hope for the future.” At least he could garden.’ Letters are performances of the self, of course, and Beckett knew what he was at, including flirting with self-parody. His long-time confidante and lover, Barbara Bray, well understood the game by the time she received this jolly missive from Porto Santo near ...”

“... Similar ideas about vigorous and slovenly peoples caught on quickly in colonial Africa. Zulus were self-evidently ‘martial’, even though they loafed around with their cattle; Hausa and Fulani in Nigeria were, in the words of Stuart Stephens, ‘bonny fechters’. But Churchill and his followers failed to win their case. Too many British top brass and ...”

“... as ‘children’, supposedly incapable of forming the rational political society that justified self-government. After the frontier closed, Latin American nations became the new irresponsibles. Woodrow Wilson’s Latin American experts, as they prepared for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, ranked countries ‘as mature, immature or criminal’ and came up ...”

“... There’s Molly Zane, an Australian nurse with a ‘marvellously uncivil swagger’ whose self-assurance marks her as an outsider in the west of Ireland. Then there are Sinéad’s fellow patients. There’s ‘Shane-no-one-caught-a-surname’, with all the charisma that moniker suggests (though to be fair he’s mostly unconscious); Patrick Hegarty ...”

“... One​  of the puzzling things about feminism is that it can be confused with being self-centred. If it’s good for me, a woman might say of something she wants to do – whether it’s Botox injections, running a country, writing a book or being chronically late – then it’s good for feminism! Sometimes this sort of reasoning is a necessary release; sometimes it’s a joke (on men at first, even if eventually it rebounds on women); sometimes feminism gets stuck there for a time ...”

“... is it yet entirely extinct: well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Not every item in the Duke-Edinburgh edition seems quite to count as a ‘burning beacon’, but, as this sample of Carlyle’s prose may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and ...”

“... exact, but his mild-mannered arguments culminate in emphatically radical conclusions. His sober, self-effacing prose leads the reader through a series of intricate theoretical inquiries until the trap is suddenly sprung and one is faced with the most provocative claims: chaos and tumult are to be applauded; the more nihilistic the world grows, the better; we ...”

“... otiose or actively misleading annotations and, above all, the fatuous commentary of a cynical, self-satisfied authorial persona whose only real interest is in multiplying print commodities and, therefore, his income. The aesthetics of obscurity is his greatest resource. ‘It is with Writers, as with Wells,’ he tells us. The thing to do with a shallow ...”

“... differed little from James VI of Scotland,’ Doran is not concerned with how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t – from Elizabeth, his fellow monarch and godmother, whom he never met, but with whom his relations had been complex and often fraught, despite the diplomatic amity ...”

“... and desires, but also in their refusal to pass judgment on them, no matter how irrational or self-limiting. They used their own incoherent desires as raw material. In The Hundreds, co-written with Kathleen Stewart, Berlant includes an experiment called ‘This Week in Shakes’ that documented the taste of ‘virtue breakfasts’ – protein shakes of ...”

“... remaining as jolly and animated as a ventriloquist’s puppet.’ As a child, full of anger and self-loathing, Jesse attempted his own ritual of erasure: taking a Brillo pad to his skin, he ‘put the hot tap on until it ran scalding and set to scratching off the black’.Jesse’s adolescence coincides with the rise of rap and R&B. Suddenly his skin colour ...”

“... Folly herself utter the speech in praise of folly, producing as he did so various paradoxes of self-reference. Burton, it might be said, in some degree follows the Erasmian lead in that, even as he offers an analysis of melancholy which is so zestful as to sound at times like a celebration, he presents himself as melancholy: Melancholy praising ...”

“... and stylish. Yet Freud for Historians is crippled by its restriction to what Gellner calls ‘the self-maintaining circle’ of psychoanalysis. As a convert, a successor, Gay simply puts aside the evidence of Eysenck and others that analysis is therapeutically unremarkable. Nor is he troubled by historical and cultural variety: all human life came to 19 ...”

“... they were an important element in the rhetoric and appeal of Fianna Fail, a potent mixture of self-interest and idealism. Fine Gael people, we believed, never dreamed. The first two leaders of the Fianna Fail Party, Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass, had fought in the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist ...”

“... insistence that his superior intellect entitled him to her unqualified service as a form of self-abasement that perpetuated the most conventional elements of male domination, and embraced women’s secondary status. And with the rise of Post-Structuralist feminist theory, Beauvoir has been criticised as an old-fashioned thinker and ...”